With the progress of society and development of wireless communication technologies, higher requirements are imposed on communication rates and communication quality. Wired transmission meets such requirements to some extent, but wired transmission involves distribution of optical cables or lease of wired resources, which restricts the use of wired transmission. Using a relay for wireless backhaul transmission has attracted immense attention in the industry recently. The relay technology enables extension of cell coverage, enhancement of cell capacity, and equalization of cell throughput.
A frame structure in a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system is measured in frames. Each frame includes 10 subframes, and each subframe is fixed to be 1 ms. While the LTE evolves toward LTE-Advanced (LTE-A), the LTE and the LTE-A networks will coexist in a long period. When applying the relay technology to the LTE-A or LTE, it is required to consider the technical features of the existing LTE system Revision 8 (R8) in order to ensure compatibility with the User Equipment (UE) in the LTE R8 system.
However, the relay transmission performed according to the frame structure put forward in the prior art is unable to be compatible with the UE in the LTE R8 system.